People on these fora talk a lot about priorities and very rarely does it stack up with what is actually being prioritised and how those features compete with each other for attention.
For instance, here you mention how of course Free France shouldn't get new portraits because they will have very few divisions and not need many generals and also France is not a popular choice anyway (?), yet La Resistance did in fact add new generals to Free France specifically, with unique portraits! These are generals not available pre-capitulation (namely, Marie-Pierre Koenig and Georges Catroux, along with Admiral Emilie Muselier, all from focuses in the new Free French tree)! It is clear that, whatever the rationale for leaving four generals in baseline France with generic portraits only, it was not a lack of regard for the necessity of providing generals to Free France.
Bear in mind also that La Resistance includes unique portraits for:
a) A would-be Spanish dictator who is railroaded to die in a week
b) A claimant to the Spanish throne who does not even appear in game due to the fact that he died historically early enough in 1936 that it would not be feasible
c) A Brazilian monarchist who, due to the way that whole tree works, never actually ends up ruling Brazil barring extremely contrived interference (and perhaps not even then)
All this is to say, I don't think it makes much sense to ascribe priority-driven narratives. We honestly don't have a very clear picture of Paradox's priorities with respect to portraits, but what evidence we do have tends to disagree with the usual narratives.
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